


here in the cold

by piggy09



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hogwarts, F/F, Slytherin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-17
Updated: 2018-05-17
Packaged: 2019-05-08 02:40:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14684742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: Of course Sarah is a Muggleborn. Muggleborns are desperate. Muggleborns are ragged. Rachel tells people she’s a halfblood from a distant tree of the Scrimgeour family; this is barely enough to save her, enough to get her a seat at the table with the young Malfoys and Zabinis and Chos.Down the Slytherin table, Sarah shoves so much food in her mouth she might choke on it. A cold-skinned blonde-haired pureblood leans in close to Rachel and whispers:Mudbloods. Voice a warm, breathy curl of amusement and disdain.Rachel’s blood isn’t mud in her veins, it’s ice. It’s steel. It’s something thick and silver from the bottom of her potions cauldron.Animals, she whispers back.





	here in the cold

**Author's Note:**

> Warning for wizard racism!

i.

Rachel makes a point of not speaking to Sarah for their entire first year at Hogwarts.

Muggleborns are already hated enough by the rest of their House – Rachel learned this in Diagon Alley, at the same time she learned that Slytherin was the only possible choice. Ambition. The same ambition that made her take a train, alone, from Cambridge to buy her textbooks and uniforms with gold she’d gotten at Gringotts from selling her mother’s jewelry. Ambition kept her here. Ambition kept her chin up, kept her wand straight, burning in her chest as she showered sparks from wood.

She wouldn’t realize until later: that day in Diagon Alley was the first time she met Sarah. A girl about Rachel’s age and height, with Rachel’s wiry brown hair, sprinting out of Flourish and Blotts with an armful of books held tight to her chest. Magic alarms blaring. Sarah running, and running, and running.

So of course she’s a Muggleborn. Muggleborns are desperate. Muggleborns are ragged. Rachel tells people she’s a halfblood from a distant tree of the Scrimgeour family; this is barely enough to save her, enough to get her a seat at the table with the young Malfoys and Zabinis and Chos. 

Down the table, Sarah shoves so much food in her mouth she might choke on it. A cold-skinned blonde-haired pureblood leans in close to Rachel and whispers:  _Mudbloods_. Voice a warm, breathy curl of amusement and disdain.

Rachel’s blood isn’t mud in her veins, it’s ice. It’s steel. It’s something thick and silver from the bottom of her potions cauldron.

 _Animals_ , she whispers back. She pulls her hair over her shoulder, a nervous gesture she hasn’t gotten rid of yet. She means it, every syllable of that word.

ii.

The other Slytherins like Rachel more now – which is to say that they hate her, in the sharp pleased way they all hate each other. They hate Rachel for her essays, for the way the Transfiguration professor nods when Rachel turns a splinter into a perfect feather. They hate Rachel for the cruel things Rachel whispers to them and about them before she shares her food with them or offers a handful of her spare mermaid’s eyelashes. She understands how Slytherin works: it’s a knot of snakes tangled into each other, fangs turned outwards. She fits. It’s the first time she’s ever fit.

Sarah isn’t a snake. Rachel doesn’t know why she’s here.

Sarah watches them all with a mammal’s eyes – a starved lion, a scarred badger. She isn’t nearly smart enough to be a Ravenclaw, so she’s probably brave. She eats meals alone at the end of the Slytherin table and watches all of them, leg hopping, tie missing, hair a lion’s mane. Rachel doesn’t watch her back, except from the corner of her eyes.

Partway through the year, Sarah shoves herself into the reptile-tangle. She spits out information on half the purebloods, she threatens, she bribes. They hand over their notes and they coax Sarah’s wrists into flicking the right way, fingertips barely touching her terrible Mudblood skin. Rachel helps. Rachel keeps her chin high. Rachel keeps  _animals_  tucked under her tongue, so she can taste it every time she breathes.

“Why even try,” Rachel says, once. She leans away from Sarah’s cauldron and coughs so hard she nearly vomits; the smoke is terrible, thick and black. Rachel vanishes the contents of Sarah’s cauldron before they both die of it.

“‘cause I don’t want to fail,” Sarah spits back. She clenches her fists, rocks from foot to foot. Looks at her store of potion ingredients. Frowns. Looks at Rachel’s (not much bigger, and Rachel certainly isn’t going to offer). Frowns again. Runs a hand through her hair.

“I know you don’t get it,” Sarah says, “because this is – this is normal for you, yeah? But it’s all I’ve got. Haven’t got a home, haven’t got papers, haven’t got  _anything_  for livin’ in the Muggle world. They hate me there. Hogwarts is my home. I want it. You’ve got no idea how much I want it.”

Rachel does have an idea. No one understands more than Rachel does; the feeling is an ache in her chest, clawing at her ribs with her heartbeat,  _animals animals animals_. 

“You don’t chop your ingredients finely enough,” she says instead. “That’s why your potions keep overflowing. The ingredients don’t break down.”

Sarah picks up her knife and stabs it into the cutting board, lifts it, stabs it back down. “Thank you,” she says.

“Don’t,” Rachel says. She tucks her hair behind her ear and doesn’t look over.

iii.

Things fall apart the second Rachel steps off the train third year.

She has her bags packed – textbooks, uniforms, a poetry book from her father that she will not open. (“We’re so proud of you,” he’d said. He still thinks she’s going to a prestigious boarding school for the sciences. He’s amazed she’s managing the journey alone. He hadn’t offered to come with her.) The train ride from Cambridge is long enough that she’s always disoriented upon arrival to the train station; this is why she comes four hours before the Hogwarts Express departs. In the past it’s given her time to get a cup of tea, resettle into the skin of someone whose parents aren’t – well. Scientists.

This year she steps off the train from Cambridge and Sarah is sitting outside of Platform 9 ¾, shoulders hunched, picking at the skin along her fingernails. She looks up when she sees Rachel. Her eyes go very wide.

Rachel takes her bags and tries to vanish into the crowd but it’s too late, Sarah’s there, Sarah’s shoving her shoulder, Sarah’s saying: “That’s a Muggle train. What the hell’re you doing on a Muggle train, huh Rachel? Why didn’t your folks Apparate you in? Where’s your Portkey? Rachel? Where’s your bloody Portkey, do you hear me–”

Rachel has her wand out, tucked into the soft space between Sarah’s chin and neck. Her hand is shaking, violently. People are staring at the two of them as they walk by and no, no, they can’t be noticed, Rachel can’t be punished for this, Rachel has done  _everything right_.

“I will kill you,” she says, voice hoarse.

Sarah laughs. Rachel rears her wand back, jabs like a snake; the elm digs into Sarah’s skin and rips. Her snake fangs make Sarah bleed and Sarah reels back, staggers. Rachel levels her wand. There’s blood on the tip of it.

Sarah holds up her hands, splays them flat. (Hers aren’t shaking.) “You’re Muggleborn,” she says.

Rachel doesn’t say anything; Sarah’s eyes go from Rachel to Rachel’s hand, which is tremoring like an earthquake. The wand is darting in frenzied patterns from Sarah’s head to neck to chest and Rachel isn’t even moving it. She isn’t even moving it. Her mind is a thunderstorm and it is perfectly blank.

“Buy me a cuppa,” Sarah says.

Rachel doesn’t say anything. Sarah steps forward.

“Buy me,” she says, “a cuppa.”

Rachel does. She doesn’t remember how it happens but she does. They sit across from each other in the station coffeeshop. Rachel stares at the brown-black smear of Sarah’s blood on the end of her wand. (Later, she’ll find that it stained the wood.) (She will never manage to get it out.) Sarah wolfs down a muffin and drains her entire cup of tea. She’s all bones; she looks at Rachel with eyes like a feral dog.

“You’re Muggleborn,” she says again.

Rachel doesn’t say anything. Still. She swallows.

Sarah whistles out a breath through her teeth,  _sss_ , and looks away. Her legs hop under the table. “All this time,” she says, “when they were treating me like a dog, and I had to  _fight_  my way into my own bloody House, and you knew, and you could’ve – you’re like me. And you just –  _let_  them?”

She has her hands pressed against her forehead, fingers laced into her hairline. She looks up at Rachel.

“Yes,” Rachel says. She tilts her chin up. Sarah’s face cracks open and she’s opening her mouth and Rachel says, in one great rush: “You think I haven’t fought? You think I don’t need this, just the way you do? You were dead weight. There was a target on your back from the moment that hat said Slytherin. I cast you off because it was the only possible way I could have survived here. You’ve managed on your own. I’ve managed on my own. We might as well just – keep going.”

Realization dawns on Sarah’s face. “None of them know,” she breathes. “but I know. I could  _bury_  you, Rachel.”

“It wouldn’t save you,” Rachel says.

Sarah looks away. Her whole body jitters, some lion’s nobility prowling around her bones.

Rachel exhales, takes a sip of tea. “You should have been in Gryffindor,” she says, and Sarah laughs. The sound hits the table like a coin and wobbles and stills.

“Gryffindors don’t want things the way I do,” she says. She looks at Rachel, tilts her head, considers. “The way we do.”

So now they’re a  _we_.

They are, because Rachel doesn’t have a choice. Sarah watches her with those black eyes everywhere they go, and she could tell anyone at any time, and her hands are around Rachel’s neck always. Sarah sits next to Rachel during meals; Rachel can’t stop her. Sarah gets Rachel to help her with Potions (she’s still terrible) and Rachel can’t stop her. Sarah bites at her with teeth; Rachel doesn’t care if they’re mammal or reptile at this point, all she knows is that they hurt.

“How long,” she says, when they’re tucked away in a corner of the library and Rachel is putting Sarah’s Care of Magical Creatures essay through the guillotine.

Sarah doesn’t play stupid. “As long as I can,” she says.

Rachel slashes her quill through another line.  _I know_ , she thinks,  _I know_. She crosses that thought out too. Animals, animals, animals–

iii (i).

Sarah jumps on the train to Cambridge just as it’s pulling away from the station. She drags her bags to Rachel’s compartment, sits down next to her.

“Get out,” Rachel says.

“Listen,” Sarah says.

“Get  _out_ ,” Rachel says. “There’s no one to confess to. You have nothing to hold over me.”

“Please,” Sarah says.

It’s the first time Rachel has ever heard Sarah say  _please_.

“I don’t have a home,” Sarah says, “I’m in the foster system, I guess, but I keep bloody vanishing for most of the year and I don’t have the bloody paperwork and I don’t have a place to bloody stay and I can’t spend another summer starving. I won’t. D’you know what I had to do last summer, Rachel? Do you know?”

Rachel looks away. Outside the train, the Muggle world blurs by and continues not to matter.

“Just–” Sarah says, and her voice breaks. Then she says it again: “Please.”

Rachel looks at Sarah, finally. She swallows. She blinks until her eyes are clear.

“You aren’t meeting my parents,” she says.

It’s easy not to. Rachel’s parents work long hours, in the lab, and the house is silent and still. Rachel gives Sarah one of their unused, sterile guest bedrooms. She spends the summer the way she has spent every summer: reading ahead in next year’s textbooks, mouthing spells and practicing wristwork alone in her empty room. She pushes herself further than she can bear. Ambition, ambition.

The problem is that Sarah won’t leave her alone.

She keeps showing up in Rachel’s room, like a feral cat. She could go anywhere – there are plenty of alleyways to vanish to in Cambridge, and the day is empty between breakfast and lunch and smuggled-up leftovers from Rachel’s dinner. She stays with Rachel instead.

Rachel doesn’t realize Sarah is paying attention until Sarah clears her throat in the middle of the afternoon, leans forward and prods an Arithmancy chart written on cheap Muggle notebook paper. “You forgot Bagshot’s Law.”

She had forgotten it. She erases it with the end of her pencil, writes it back in again. The afternoon light slants through Rachel’s window; trees rustle outside. Sarah is wearing one of the four outfits she owns. She doesn’t look starving anymore, which Rachel doesn’t like to think about.

Rachel rewrites the chart. She says: “Thank you.”

iv.

Rachel doesn’t mean for them to become friends. It’s a disastrous idea: it ruins everything. She has to work even harder to stay in the knotted coils of the purebloods – she has to be twice as clever, twice as cruel. She makes herself cruel. She slashes on her lipstick across her face; she starts wearing her hair back in a tight knot behind her head. Sarah still wears hers loose, and Rachel doesn’t think about it.

She really does try not to think about Sarah. But when it’s the two of them…

It’s easier. That’s all. Sarah already knows; Rachel can’t ruin anything with Sarah, there are no stakes. They are both already animals, and so neither of them ever mean anything. It’s glorious.

There’s still time for everything that matters, though; Rachel takes tea in the Slytherin common room, idly suggests ways to make the latest Gryffindor brat’s life hell. Sarah tries out for the Quidditch team – makes it – vanishes from Rachel’s life even more, too busy catching or throwing or seeking or whatever it is she’s doing out there.

(Rachel goes to her games, but that doesn’t mean anything.)

(It isn’t as if she cheers.)

(She watches from the middle of her snakeskin allies as Sarah rolls on her broomstick, shouts, laughs, screams. She keeps her hands tight between her thighs. She doesn’t cheer.)

At breakfast, sometimes, Sarah asks if Rachel watched the game. Rachel always says she didn’t. Sarah’s face cracks a little bit, but she’s learning to be a better liar. Rachel is helping her be a better liar. Mostly, Sarah’s face is very still.

iv (i).

It’s hard to tell which one of them fell asleep first. Rachel wakes with a start to the sound of her parents closing the front door downstairs; she can hear them murmuring to each other and it must be so late in the night and she and Sarah are both asleep on top of Rachel’s bed. They’re using their Defense Against the Dark Arts textbooks as pillows – Sarah still is. She’s still asleep. The moonlight touches the edge of her face, runs fingers down her cheek. They are both fifteen years old.

It’s impossible to know how long she looks. Eventually Sarah’s eyes open; slowly, sleepily, she shifts her head to look at Rachel. Then she sits up. They’re both sitting up. Sarah’s eyes are wide and dark in the moonlight. Her whole face is soft. It’s really entirely too easy to

v.

They must be able to see it on her face.

Everyone must know, what Rachel did during the summer.

They’re letting her go. All of them. The other Slytherins. They’re moving away from her – slowly, carefully, like they think she won’t notice. They are snakes and she is no longer warm. They are moving towards the sun.

Sarah could be Rachel’s sun. In back hallways, in dark corners of the library, in the dorm when no one is there – her hands are warm, her lips are warm. It’s easy to lean towards her.

Sarah has mud in her veins. Rachel doesn’t. Rachel has ice – steel – something thick and silver from the bottom of her potions cauldron. She is very, very cold.

It takes ages to make the spell work: layers of charms and sixth-level, seventh-level spells. But it does work. All of Sarah’s pockets vomit mud, and they don’t stop. All of her robes. Her pajamas. Everything that touches her body is muddy. It takes the professors a week to reverse the spell – to unweave it from Sarah’s terrible animal skin – and during that time Sarah is filthy and stained and unlovable. Everyone veers away from her in the hallways. Everyone sits at the other end of the Slytherin table. Sarah is utterly alone.

She could break Rachel at any time.

Rachel wonders – when she thinks about it–

(she always thinks about it)

(always)

–if anyone would even believe Sarah anymore. Maybe they’d all believe Rachel. They’ve all come back to her, now; their hands are on her shoulders, their mouths are whispering in her ear. The Slytherin House is a tangle of snakes with its fangs directed at everyone else. Rachel bit down. She’s a snake again, and everyone knows.

Sarah is alone. Her robes are stained with dirt and her face is pale and her eyes are dark and she is alone.

Rachel doesn’t regret it.

She keeps on not regretting it. She doesn’t come to Quidditch games. She ignores the other end of the Slytherin table. In the dormitories, she goes to bed early and wakes up early – before Sarah even drops into her bed. She ignores Sarah in Potions, even when her cauldron smokes. She whispers into pureblood ears and all of them smirk, together.

Because she’s avoiding Sarah, it takes Sarah a while to hunt Rachel down. But she manages. 

In the middle of a crowded hallway, even.

The hex hits Rachel and claws at her scalp, wrings hands around her neck. She feels feathers touching her shoulders in waves, only they aren’t feathers. When the hex stops throttling her she opens her eyes and dark hair is splayed on the ground around her like a wound.

She lifts a hand up and touches the new short sharp edge of her hair. Out of the corner of her eye: pureblood blonde.

The Prefects cart Sarah away, and she watches Rachel. Rachel doesn’t know what her eyes are saying.  _I know what you are,_ maybe. Maybe  _I forgive you_. Maybe  _only one of us is going to make it out of here, and I know it isn’t going to be me_.

Rachel lowers her eyes to the ground, to the remains. She doesn’t meet Sarah’s gaze, in case her own eyes say  _I’m sorry_.

v (i).

Rachel takes the train to Cambridge alone. She lives alone. She dreams alone.

Mostly, she dreams about Sarah.

vi.

She is sixteen. They are a sixteen year old’s dreams, and they burn her. Sarah’s eyes when she cast that hex. Sarah’s hands. Sarah in Rachel’s bedroom in the summer, only the entire room is on fire. She burns the skin of Rachel’s neck, Rachel’s thighs, Rachel’s chest.

Rachel wakes up.

Sarah is dating a Slytherin boy, and she’s curled around him like kudzu. Rachel misses her. She tries not to. Sarah is an animal – Sarah is an animal – Sarah is prowling through Rachel’s dreams, and she’s the only thing Rachel wants to touch anymore.

Rachel dates a Slytherin boy. It’s dull. He’s useful for upholding the fiction.

She wonders when she got tired of lying.

Sarah coaxes her broom faster in laps around Hogwarts, around the towers. She kisses the boy. She transforms a stone into a bird and it flies across the room and lands on Rachel’s shoulder and Rachel flicks her wand at it and turns it back. It falls to the ground. She misses it – the bird – the way its claws dug in. She wishes Sarah had been a Gryffindor. She wishes Sarah had wanted her more, or maybe wanted her less. The other Slytherins are boring. They’re so caught up in their own games. Why does everything have to be a game, anyways. Why can’t they live without needing to win.

Rachel picks the skin around her cuticles to pieces. Her potions boil over (her potions have never boiled over). She dreams about Sarah.

She stays over Christmas break – usually she doesn’t, she makes up a vacation that her parents aren’t taking her on and she takes the train home and she lives in her room alone. This year she stays. Sarah always stays. The other Slytherins always go.

It means the common room is empty, when Sarah gets back at the end of the first day and Rachel is still there.

Sarah stops in the door. “Rachel,” she says. “Don’t you have a trip to go on? Aren’t mummy and daddy Apparating you to Egypt?”

The Slytherin common room is under the lake; the windows let in the waterlight, and it ripples all over the room and over Sarah’s face and Sarah’s hands and the clenching of Sarah’s hands into fists.

“I can’t stop thinking about you,” Rachel says, which is true.

“Bet you can’t,” Sarah says. She spits the words out like snake venom. She shifts from foot to foot – the only thing, the only good thing, is that she doesn’t leave the room. She just stands there. Rachel is curled up on one of the stiff terrible couches of the Slytherin common room and Sarah is standing there and the water is pouring over them and it isn’t even touching them.

Rachel stands up from the couch. Sarah’s weight shifts fast to her back foot and she doesn’t move. She is trembling with the effort it takes to stay still.

“I had to choose,” Rachel says. “Between you, and the rest of them. I had to make a choice.”

“I know,” Sarah says. She stays so still as Rachel comes closer, closer. “I get it. I get you. I’m not gonna give you up, is that what you want me to say? The whole rest of the school already thinks we’re cruel. I’m not gonna be cruel to you.”

Rachel is close enough to see the water at the edge of Sarah’s eyes.

“I should have chosen you,” she says, and she steps forward. She kisses her.

When Sarah doesn’t move, Rachel steps even closer. She splays her hands over Sarah’s neck; she doesn’t press down. She tries to say in the kiss what she can’t say out loud, which is mostly  _I’m sorry_. She used up all her honesty:  _I should have chosen you_. She isn’t a lion. She isn’t brave enough to tell the truth.

Sarah stays still as stone and then she makes a sound like weeping and she kisses Rachel back, furiously warm. Her mouth is sloppy and desperate against Rachel’s mouth. She gets her hands under Rachel’s robes and under Rachel’s shirt and onto the skin of Rachel’s hips – and her hands are warm, they’re so warm. Rachel hadn’t realized she was shivering-cold until Sarah touched her and Sarah was warm.

Sarah rests her forehead against Rachel’s, lets out these endless sobbing breaths. “Don’t be cruel to me,” she whispers. “Rachel, please. Please.”

“I won’t,” Rachel whispers, and kisses her again.

vi (i).

They drink in Muggle bars, they dance in Muggle clubs. They touch each other. They’re Muggles and they’re animals and Rachel was stupid – unbearably stupid – to ever want anything else but the way Sarah looks at her, the way Sarah’s hand feels in her hand.

vii.

The purebloods are shallow and cruel. Rachel holds Sarah’s hand in one hand and her wand in the other; she repels nasty little hexes, she fetches Sarah’s shoes from where they’ve been hidden and she turns gossip back into itself with words that bite like fangs. She kisses Sarah in all the dark hidden places that Hogwarts can offer up, and she kisses Sarah in the hallways too. They’re brilliant. They turn stones into birds. Slytherin wins the Quidditch Cup and the team hoists Sarah up on their shoulders and Rachel screams from the stands until she has to stop from laughing.

They’re happy.

Summer at Hogwarts: the endless blue sky, the warm gold sun. The two of them sprawled across the grass of the grounds – Sarah’s head is in Rachel’s lap, her long dark hair splayed everywhere. It’s warmed from the sun when Rachel touches it. Sarah’s eyes are closed. She’s lost her tie, again, but it’s fine: she’s a truer Slytherin than any of them, really. No one else wants the way that she wants. No one else carries an eleven-year-old girl at the center of their chest, her arms full of stolen books, her stomach empty, her entire body sharp and desperate with urgency.  _This could be mine. This should be mine. This will be mine, I’ll take it, I’ll grab it with both hands._

Sarah is eighteen, summer-drowsing. Rachel touches her hands to Sarah’s forehead – her fingers are cold, but they’re warming in the sun. Sarah opens her eyes.

“Are you thinking about the job again?” she says. “You’re better than anyone at that bloody Ministry, you know it. They’re twats if they don’t make you head of your bloody department after three months.”

“No,” Rachel says. “I’m thinking about you.” She trails her fingernails along Sarah’s forehead, tucks Sarah’s hair behind her ear. Sarah’s eyelids lower into a blink; she opens them again.

“I’ll come back,” she says quietly. “I just want out. For a little while. There’s so much bloody magic England won’t even teach us. There’s so much to see.”

She catches Rachel’s hand in her hand, brings it to her lips. Presses those lips to Rachel’s knuckles. Lifts them. “You could come with me,” she says.

Rachel shakes her head. She lifts her hand, cups Sarah’s face. “I’ll be here,” she says. “When you come back. I have a deposit on the apartment already. I’ll keep your things.”

“What if I don’t come back,” Sarah says.

“You’ll come back.”

“Yeah,” Sarah says, voice rough. She sits up, leans over Rachel, kisses her. She tastes like the sun. Rachel tangles her hand in Sarah’s hair, and kisses her back.

**Author's Note:**

> Hard feelings—  
> These are what they call hard feelings of love  
> When the sweet words and fevers all leave us right here in the cold  
> Alone with the hard feelings of love  
> God I wish I believed ya when you told me this was my home  
> \--"Hard Feelings," Lorde
> 
> This fic gave me general Melodrama vibes, but with all of the hot/cold stuff in this fic I liked that title best. Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed! :)


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